BioWare Takes Old Republic Queues Seriously

For those of you who have been enjoying Star Wars: The Old Republic during early game access, know that queues to get into servers can be pretty hefty. There have been reports, as high, as 2 hour wait times. That’s not acceptable. The scary part is, the game isn’t even live yet. SWTOR comes out officially tomorrow, December 20th. What will the queues be like then?

Even during early access, more servers have been added. BioWare plans on adding even more. Is it enough? While the wave invites to early access were unique, did they really corral new players into newer servers? I know people who pre-planned their guilds all went to the same servers regardless of new servers made. Let’s face it, the hard core players, in the large early access guilds, won’t be moving to newer servers and will only be swelling in more numbers.

Queue times are obnoxious for any player. The hard-cores who live, drink, and sleep Star Wars are afraid to log off and the casuals who want to play for a half hour before sleep lose their window. As previously stated, the game isn’t even out yet.

But don’t fret! BioWare isn’t only aware of this problem but they are also taking “the matter seriously.” An official statement from Jeff Hickman, BioWare Executive Producer - Live Services, says:

We know there have been questions about the queues on the servers, so we wanted to take a moment to give you some insight.

In order to ensure that the service would be smooth and stable, we staged how we brought people into the Early Game Access program, adding people in waves. As you know, there are a lot of folks who want to play the game right now and we want to make sure they have lots of people to play with. Balancing this with figuring out when to bring new servers online to help alleviate the size of the queues is part art and part science. On one hand, you do not want people to wait too long – on the other hand, you want to make sure that people have a dynamic, engaging community to play with for long after launch. Either way, we have one clear objective – to make sure folks have fun.

While we can’t promise that there won’t ever be queues, we can promise you that we are taking this matter seriously and constantly reviewing them to make sure that they are manageable and reasonable.

So that’s comforting to some degree. I’m glad the company has a clear objective to see that their players have fun. There will always be element out of their control making the promise of “no queues” impossible, but it seems like they are doing their best to tone them down. As a last point, as much as all gamers loathe queues, they exist to make the game run more smoothly – for those who are in.